Something Wicked This Way Comes: A Summary and Reader's Guide
What it is about
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a dark fantasy novel by Ray Bradbury, published in 1962. It is the second book in his Green Town Trilogy, and unlike Dandelion Wine or The Martian Chronicles it was written as a single continuous narrative rather than assembled from earlier short stories.
The story begins on an overcast 23 October in Green Town, Illinois. Two boys, both days away from turning fourteen, meet a lightning rod salesman called Tom Fury who warns that a storm is coming. He tells them one of their houses is in danger and hands Jim a lightning rod. That night the whole town seems to feel something in the air, including Will's father Charles, who works at the local library. Word spreads that a carnival is arriving.
A carnival in late October is odd, and Charles mistrusts it immediately. The boys sneak out to watch the train pull in at three in the morning. Clouds come down and harden into the canvas of the tents. What follows is a slow discovery that the carnival's attractions are not illusions. Its carousel can run a person's age forwards or backwards, which makes it the most dangerous machine in the world, because almost everyone in town wants something it appears to offer.
The title comes from Macbeth, from the witches' line "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes".
The main characters
William Halloway and Jim Nightshade are best friends and near neighbours, born minutes apart either side of midnight. Will is the cautious one, the brake. Jim is hungrier, quicker to lean towards whatever the carnival is selling. When Mr Cooger and Mr Dark first catch the boys near the carousel, it is Jim that Mr Dark studies, because Jim is the one already half persuaded.
Charles Halloway is fifty-four, a library janitor, and the emotional centre of the book. He is old enough to feel he has missed something and to be tempted himself. He is also the only adult who researches the problem rather than denying it, discovering that the carnival returns to towns like this once every few decades, always in October.
Against them stand Mr Dark, the illustrated man whose tattoos include the faces of people he has taken, Mr Cooger, and the Dust Witch, a blind sensor of heartbeats who hunts the boys from a balloon. Miss Foley, the boys' seventh grade teacher, shows what happens to the people who accept the offer. She comes out of the Mirror Maze dazed, and the maze has done its work before the carousel ever touches her.
The themes
The engine of the book is dissatisfaction with your own age. The boys want to be older so they can be taken seriously. Charles wants to be younger so he can keep up with his son. Miss Foley wants her youth back. The carnival does not force anything on anyone. It simply grants the wish, then keeps the person. Bradbury treats the longing as entirely understandable and the bargain as fatal.
Underneath that sits the conflict between good and evil as something inside each person rather than a clash between sides. The carnival feeds on fear, regret and shame. Its people were once customers. That is why the counter-weapon in this book is not strength or cleverness but joy. Laughter, acceptance and love are what the carnival cannot digest.
Friendship carries the rest. Will and Jim are close enough to read each other and different enough to pull apart, and most of the tension comes from Will trying to hold on to a friend who keeps drifting towards the tents.
How the final act works
Skip this section if you want the book clean.
After a night-time confrontation at the library, where Mr Dark crushes Charles's hand and the Dust Witch tries to stop his heart, Charles saves himself by starting to laugh. The laughter wounds her and drives her off. He follows Mr Dark back to the carnival to get the boys. There, during a bullet catch illusion, he carves a smile onto a fake bullet and uses it to mortally wound the Witch, calling his son out of the Mirror Maze at the same time. Trapped in the maze himself while searching for Jim, he destroys the mirrors with laughter rather than force.
Why it still matters
Bradbury wrote boyhood and autumn better than almost anyone, and this is the book where he pointed that prose at genuine horror. It reads as a children's adventure and an adult's book about mortality at the same time, which is why people reread it at thirty and find a different novel than the one they met at thirteen. It has fed decades of American horror writing about small towns, carnivals and the things that arrive by train, and its October imagery has become part of the season itself.
